Why Comics?

A comic can be as complex or as unique as the mind and hands that create it. Drawing stories as comics is often overlooked in the classrooms, but students are often grateful for the "permission" to compose their stories in this exciting and welcoming medium.

Enter StoryArk Cartoon and Comics Workshops

In StoryArk cartoon workshops, we create characters, explore settings and situations, and show how through combining words and pictures, scenes and stories are created. We look at the broad spectrum of available comic work covering myriads of styles and subjects, and encourage students to draw in whatever manner they are comfortable with to create the stories that to them mean the most.

We teach how to connect ideas through integrating words and pictures. This visual literacy helps reluctant readers to write and reluctant draw-ers to draw. Students learn how to organize information clearly on a page. They have to extract data on their subject through research. They also have to edit their work. They have to be diligent to finish their projects.

Comics aren't just about funny pictures!

Look at this beautiful sequence from French artist Edmound Baudoin to see some of the iconographic and communicative potential in the comics form.

Reach Reluctant Writers and Readers with Comics!

The comic strip-making workshops are a way to reach students with many different learning styles. The comics form lends itself to any subject and any artistic manner. Cartoon character exploration appeals to even the most resistant child. In its more than 100 year history, the comics medium has been used to tell stories ranging from comedy and satire to action and adventure to topics as serious as those of family histories, self-identity, and war.

Creating comics develops organizational and critical thinking skills, from connecting ideas to conceptualizing, executing, and editing an entire project. Making comics is writing! When kids make stories in pictures, they're learning to write!

Learning to write with comics uses skill sets of the entire brain including:

1. The ability to pay attention
   
2. The ability to extract information
   
3. The ability to communicate ideas and emotions clearly
   
4. The ability to use both words and images.
   

Additonally, comic strips in the classroom have great potential because students often are already interested and engaged in this medium as readers and may have a fair level of visual literacy and sophistication.

StoryArk Cartoon Workshops Provide:

1. Students with critical thinking, planning, organization, and language skills.
   
2. Teachers with a learning tool they can employ in many different contexts (history, language arts, even science, math, and standardized test preparation)
   
3. A way of meeting curriculum agendas using a different approach to learning that students find fun and exhilarating!

Arts and Tests

Recent long-term studies conducted by Harvard and other leading universities have concluded that students who take at least four years of art and music education before college do far better on their SAT exams. Art and music students scored an average of 59 points higher on their verbal skills and 44 points higher on their math test scores than students who did not study the arts.